Reviewing a Dell Linux PC 23 years ago
liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org
liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org
These days my personal and professional daily drivers are, respectively, a 2021 and a 2022 Framework laptop, both with Fedora/GNOME updated regularly. The software is so much more usable than any MS OS since Windows 7, and even MacOS of the past 2-3 years (many people I talk to have remarked on how MacOS quality and usability have been degrading recently).
The only pain points I notice with my Framework are not strictly software-related (dislaimer: I don’t play much in terms of modern games anymore); power management/suspend (an atrocity in my experience), and quality of internal peripherals (the mic, webcam, and trackpad are almost useless, so I use just use a dock and external peripherals - and they work great with minimal hassle).
Not to sound like a broken record, but 2024 will probably be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop, especially with Framework’s AMD 16-inch laptop with upgradeable GPU making a huge splash, and MS and Apple continuing to alienate developers and power users. I’m actually glad they’re getting worse because it pushes more people toward FOSS - severe but temporary punishment is actually more effective and less cruel than life in prison.
While Valve admitted failure, and has to emulate Windows (yeah not quite emulation), as mechanism to have games on GNU/Linux, not even studios developing Android games with the NDK can be bothered to target GNU/Linux.
It'll never happen, but that's what it'll take.
You don't see Steam Deck users installing Windows, though they very well could, and I'm sure some would prefer to do so, but the experience in that device isn't bad enough - or bad at all for most - for people to bother, likewise the experience of Windows isn't bad enough for people to bother.
Framework won't suddenly cause a major shift, simply because they just don't sell that many devices. These kinds of things don't happen in a year.
I set up my mother on Linux mint in 2013~ and she genuinely didn't have issues with it (until the hardware finally kicked the bucket).
She had much more issues going from Windows XP to Windows 8, which was something she had to do around the same time for work.
This is a reminder that Windows 8 is coming up on 11 years old. :D
I had to install some Windows 11 machines for work and I was honestly dumbfounded by how convoluted it was.
The "problem" is that there's only a few people selling Linux laptops and they're doing it to target a niche market.
I have to seriously wonder how much market cap there would be if people had to install Windows themselves.
Another irony is that most folks who are making an autonomous decision to use GNU/Linux can probably figure out how to install and update it, so if you want to make good money pre-installing, selling to consumers, and supporting/updating the OS, you need to make a massive marketing push to convince folks to switch.
That's hardly an admission of failure. No different in practice from "emulating" the JVM or .NET CLR for applications to run that way.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"
Seriously, though, I feel you in terms of power management. My memories of my Thinkpad's Fedora days are painful in terms of sleep and hibernate.
My Chromebook is bad, of course, Linux under the hood, right? It likes to utterly disobey the lid switch. If I shut the lid it stays awake until otherwise idling out. If the computer is off and I open the lid, it springs to life even before I can hit the Power button. This is Not Supposed to Happen. wcyd?
Also, the built-in fingerprint reader works great on Ubuntu and Fedora (Fedora even has it integrated with the terminal).
For more context, I rarely use laptops in my lap; I work from home and prefer at least some semblance of ergonomics, so for me they’re really just “easily-movable computers” i.e. I can work from the basement when needed, and on the dinner table when the house is empty.
It's usable but doesn't seem to be getting better, Linux prizes quality over compatibility and rewrites things whenever they feel like, in non backwards compatible ways.
I really wish there was a Canonical sized company doing exactly what Ubuntu does, but with something like NixOS, or else just Exactly what Debian does, sans dynamic linking so there's less dependencies to have conflicts with.
We don't really daily printed things that look nice anymore. Certainly web pages don't look/read well, and as much as I like Feedly/Unread, reading an article there isn't better than reading a printed magazine article.. then and still.
I actually really miss designing webpages without any consideration for accessibility or for different sized screens because I felt like you could be a lot more creative back when you'd just throw a "Best viewed at 800x600 in Internet Explorer" disclaimer on your website.
You can't both enforce a very specific aspect ratio and dimensions and be responsive with any semblance of practicality. The reason the magazine page can look good is because the person designing it knows exactly the size of all the elements, the aspect ratio and dimensions of the page it's being printed to. All of the graphics are placed intentionally, and all of the type is set intentionally to exactly where they want it to be and how they want it to look, with of course the constraint of the content dictating what that will be.
On a webpage you're just doing a lot of guessing of what the viewport might look like for users. You probably could, through media queries, determine if a person's viewport is exactly right for your one desired layout and only show it if that's the case, but that'd be a waste of resources. You could also enforce the layout you want in your css by setting things by pixels and then you'll be sure that it looks exactly as you intend... except then it isn't responsive.
So hypothetically, yes, you could still have it be responsive, but there's just no point, is there, if only the people that happen to meet your very specific requirements ever see it?
That's why good web design is hard and why it's become, in my opinion, kind of boring in terms of layout design. You have to account for all those different devices looking at it and try to make it look as nice as possible while still being useable.
I am that Liam :-) but the design isn't mine. It's a default Dreamwidth theme which I didn't choose or touch.
I think it is intentionally retro and that is why it looks good.
In contrast, compare with the WinAmp website:
As soon as I saw the new site, I knew the new version of the program would be junk and wasn't even worth evaluating.
All huge, wasteful of space, nasty animations wasting my time and my CPU cycles. It's plastic sh1t, and also expensive and a lot of work has been wasted on it... and therefore it seems very likely that the program will be too.
Then to rub it in, the screenshot looks like horrendous flat cr4p that reminds me of Spotify, another egregious excrescence of gratuitous Javascript masquerading as a native program.
I did work in PCW's office a few times.
I think it was Quark Xpress on classic MacOS. So there would be an artfully-designed template into which my edited copy was poured.
I did like PCW's design, though.
I worked for Heise for a while, and got to read and take material from Linux Magazine, both in English and German. I find German typographical design awful myself and I think most German print tech mags look really bad...
But I think that to German eyes, British print material looks so glossy and (to borrow a musical term) over-produced that the instinctive response is to distrust it: it looks like advertising or "advertorial".
What to me looks cheap and amateurish and ugly, I suspect to a German looks trustworthy and honest.
Whereas as a Brit, American advertising looks so plastic and fake that I instinctually distrust it. It's all acres of gleaming white teeth and fake smiles, with a big glob of disclaimer squeezed in somewhere, and it makes me recoil from the product.
Cf. product naming.
The last motorcycle I owned was a Kawasaki ZZR-1100 (a "zed zed are eleven hundred"). To Brits, the numbers sound hi-tech and exciting.
In Japan it was a ZX-11. Maybe that reminds Brits of budget Sinclair computers too much?
In America it's a ZX11 Ninja. Zee ecks eleven Ninja.
To a Brit that makes it sound like a childrens' toy. I wouldn't want to be seen dead on a bike called a "ninja". I'm not 11 and I do not aspire to be a turtle.
One thing struck me on that review though - 128MB RAM would've been pretty low specced for a pricy dual PIII 866 workstation by late 2000. I had that much a few years earlier with a dual PII 266 in a company that wasn't exactly flush with cash. I suppose having a TNT card meant it was about as low specced as workstations got.
> RIMMs were invented by a person who appreciated the user-friendly nature of SCSI.
Excellent! Very nearly a tea | nose > keyboard moment. Well played. :-)
The thing is that, as a reviewer, you only get the machine for hours to days. All you can talk about is what's in front of you, not maintenance, upgrading and so on.
RDRAM was a huge mistake for the computer hardware industry, but I ascribe this more to Hanlon's razor than anything else.
A video card suitable for gamers but not for a workstation. We have 2-3 Business Hype cycles which rely completely on graphic cards.
Or the shocking default setting of DHCP in the TCP/IP setting. As if today 90% of network stacks would work without DHCP and IMHO a Network Admin would never rely on a front end for managing IP addresses.
Yep -- that's why I thought it was funny, and why I bothered rescuing and fixing the text and posting it on my blog.
You are just overwhelmed by free low quality content.
I agree with GP, it's a rare treat to be treated as an adult by such things, and I don't think it's anything to do with free, it's just the style of 'informal'.
> This is a blog though
You are both right and totally wrong. Mostly wrong.
> it's written like a (a often paid, yes) newspaper or something article
It's written like a magazine article because it is an article that the magazine paid me to write in 2000, and I just found it by accident and put it on my blog.
So it is my blog but that's pro work that has been edited.
> but it isn't,
Wrong.
> afaict this is some guy's blog.
Then you can't tell very well. Sorry, but you can't.
This is the magazine:
https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...
I wrote the original article, 23Y ago, and I wrote the blog post too, and I am writing this.
These days I write for the Register and you can read my stuff every day there:
Apologies. That wasn't how I read it. My bad.
> I miss when people wrote like this
Good news. We still do.
This wasn't about a laptop, but still, you're not wrong.
Supported Linux on one or two PC models is a pretty longstanding sideline of Dell's. They've had some version of Ubuntu on a laptop for a long time.
It's pretty astounding what you get for $2k 2023 dollars now, which is roughly $1k in 1998 dollars.
Plus that $2k 2023 machine will be good enough for probably 5 years even for a pretty serious professional. Versus a $3k 1998 machine that even for a young hobbyist was basically decrepit in under 3 years.
So your modern day computing run rate is like $400 2023 dollars per year, versus late 90s being easily the equivalent of $2k 2023 dollars per year.
My first dual floppy PC clone (who could afford a hard disk or genuine IBM?) in 1982 was somewhere in the low 4 digits all-in which was probably close to 10% of my gross salary as an engineer at the time.
But, yeah, you can get a very well equipped Mac for about $3K these days. (Which is obviously not the economy PC option.) Even if you were starting from scratch you'd probably have to really work to get it up to $5K with external monitor, external hard drives, peripherals, printer, etc.
Until it goes wrong. Then you are totally screwed. It's all automatic and there's nothing to troubleshoot or fix.
> This supports dual Pentium III processors running at up to 1GHz and up to four RIMMs; the review machine had two 64MB modules for 128MB of dual-channel RDRAM.
I recently dug out from storage an old, from 2002, reasonably high spec Thinkpad (sorry don’t have exact specs on hand). I was obviously running Linux on it at the time as I’ve been using Linux as my primary operating system since 1995! Yes seriously I have.
Anyway. I decide to boot it up, knowing it was stored it pretty much ideal conditions. It works perfectly, except battery of course.
It only has 64MB ram! But everything runs, the web browser. And it’s fast.
I only spent about 1 hour playing round. But it left me distraught. What has happened that our web browsers use 2G of memory and are slow! What really is the software progress in last 20 years? Obviously the hardware has progressed massively but I couldn’t help but be concerned with how little improvement was immediately obvious, in fact it was so fast and reactive GUI, faster than today!
I'll sometime wait three seconds for the explorer to open. Launching any non-trivial app takes on average 10 seconds. Sometimes copying stuff from a disk to another will show the incredible speed of 2 MB/s on stuff that should be literally instant. I have to wait for git which literally never happens to me on Linux ; just opening an MSYS shell lags (it's just a console and bash ffs!). MsMpEng.exe uses 15 - 20% CPU constantly even when turning every A/V shit off. And let's not even talk about usability - I got stuck for some reason with keyboard layouts that I didn't install, and apparently in Win 11, by default, not less than THREE SHORTCUTS will switch between layouts - ctrl+shift, alt+shift and win+space, which made coding absolutely insane until I could find a way to the "advanced keyboard settings" where the "alt+shift" shortcut could be turned off (which apparently also automagically turned off the "ctrl+shift" one).
And I could find hundred of messages on boards complaining about this, with "Microsoft MVPs" answering with the most generic and useless advice like "chkdsk", "do a check from your bios", "update your drivers".
Linux on the same hardware absolutely flies even when ran from a USB 2 stick, with as much eye candy with e.g. KDE Plasma.
And let's not talk about C++ compile times which are insane in Windows with the exact same compiler & toolchain (clang 16, libc++, lld...) compared to Linux, even when taking care of installing it on a separate drive, excluding the whole drive from virus scan...
C++ compilation takes more than twice as long as my Linux server from 2010. It's got two 16 core Xeon 2600-something processors at 2.6GHz. GCC doesn't even fully load the processors, it's something like 70% average and still runs twice as fast.
Fortunately, the exact details of my job have changed and I can switch to Linux soon. If my work machine still can't compete with my server, I can just slap distcc on it and use my server as a remote compile node. Might do it anyway, the compile is 'only' five minutes on my server, if I can combine these machines it'll likely halve again.
Trick I found was to fire up a Linux VM and do your compilation in there.
Instead of a VM you can also use WSL2, assuming you put the files in the linux file system instead of accessing the host file system. (Yes, technically that's also just a fancy VM running in Hyper-V; but it's a more integrated experience than e.g. VMWare)
Looking into compiler optimization, I can tell it's a very deep rabbithole that I'd rather stay away from if at all possible
Last time I tried that was back in the windows 7 days and VMs were almost unusable.
WSL this is not necessarily the case. I don't use WSL for a number of reasons including that.
In particular disabling MS defender (or whatever its called this week), will provide a massive increase in disk speed as its not longer scanning every single thing your reading off the disk.
This isn't so much NFTS but all the filters/etc that windows now comes with. In the past you would only get this behavior if you installed norton/mcafee and let it turn IO problems into CPU bound ones, but now its mostly unavoidable on windows. While your linux machine probably doesn't even have an always on virus scanner available.
If I just want to run something simple locally on a stripped down version of Linux it would probably be pretty fast and resource-efficient.
They are much more complex - ridiculously so - both because of the constant evolution of web standards and because of everything they need to do to keep what they execute in its own sandbox.
It doesn't help that the actual content being served just keeps on bloating. Think back to the average web page in the early 2000s: it was probably still browsed over a 56k modem, CSS was starting to get support, and if it might have had a few inline images it was still mostly text embedded in plain HTML. Web apps were CGI, JS was used sparingly, and people were still using frames.
Those pages were positively anemic when compared to what we sling around nowadays. 1 MB used to be a lot of data, and it just isn't the case anymore. You have layers of abstractions piled up on each other, isolated from the rest of the system as much as possible, slurping in, parsing and rendering multi-megabyte compressed, encrypted blobs.
But yes - it is a shame. We are doing so much more to achieve pretty much the same thing, and I keep on asking myself if we really need to.
Depending on your last mile tech in 2000 and what you have now, you might have gone fron dialup with first hop round trips of 50-100ms, to something in the neighborhood of 5-25ms with fiber, dsl or cable. Or maybe you were already on dsl or cable and things are about the same.
Most of a 200ms round trip is on a long distance route, and fiber routes have improved, as had routing equipment in the data path. If you're outside the US and Europe, there's been a lot more local interconnections too, so routes that used to bounce through US/EU in 2000 don't in 2023.
Saving a few ms here and there adds up, but 160 ms instead of 200 ms doesn't feel that much different.
Everything was fast back then. I had X11, Netscape, ethernet in the dorm. In a lot of ways I prefer the simple text heavy web pages of the time.
I've been designing integrated circuits including many chips in popular smartphones, network switches, and more. We make stuff faster but software manages to expand making my 8 core CPU with 64GB of RAM feel about the same when web browsing compared to back then.
I don't want to go back to those days but in many ways my computer with multiple X terminals, XFCE desktop, and Firefox, is extremely similar.
These days RAM is cheaper than development time so instead of writing tightly memory controlled programs in C we write in e.g. garbage collected JavaScript. It's easier to learn and quicker to develop with. Part of me is broken hearted that the “art” of efficient programming is lost but it was an inevitable consequence of software becoming so central to our lives.
(and hey, that same discipline does still exist today if you want to dabble in it, in embedded spaces etc)
Well ... about $6k which wasn't astonishing for workstation budgets. These were machines that many people used to run software that cost $100k/year.
A credit to the incredible expandability of this era of Precision Workstation machines is you could have expanded the model 620 to 3GiB of main memory, which isn't bad at all. With 2x Pentium III Xeon CPUs and 3GiB you could credibly use that machine today. All that RAM only costs $75 today.
E.g, I remember "recommended specs" for computer games that would ask for 64 MB of RAM; I had 128 MB.
All the native apps on my Mac desktop, an ass end M1 mac mini, are really really damn fast.
The moment I put windows, any managed apps or anything web based or wrapped web applications near any computer, a world of pain opens. It's mostly energy sucking buggy crap which serves the developers more than the customers. That's a cancer in the industry which is only going to get worse when we ship towers of excrement on top of WASM.
Also, I advise you to try Haiku OS Live CD. It’s refreshing.
But the real issue is that the browser does a lot more than it used to and languages with JIT compilers and automatic memory management are just going to have a much higher overhead than C++. This is doubly true when the languages are non-typed and ultra-dynamic like JS.
For a while I browsed the internet without JS enabled and sites that didn't break loaded without any visible delay.
It has become significantly cheaper and easier to build software.
That has come at the cost of an enormous complexity paid by hardware and reliability.
Less experienced programmers (only know the latest thing; promoted to mediocre project leads... while the Old Guard doesn't pass on their knowledge before retiring)
Poorly documented code resulting layered workarounds (MS code from the 80's and 90's was hot garbage in terms of comments; source: I worked on Win95 diplay drivers and didn't comment any of my 16-bit VXDs. See previous gripe about O.G. being bad at documentation)
Bloated libraries (ironically, reluctance to jettison old code that is not well understood, so patch around it and keep dragging the baggage to the next release.)
Insufficient test suites causing too much bloat (see previous comment).
More complex APIs (spywhere and integrations everywhere).
I haven't walked the Windows source tree in 30 years, it would be fascinating to see a breakdown of the kernal linker map summaries.
The first computer I felt was fast and responsive is my current MacBook Air M2.
But in all honesty, I haven’t worked with my own personal computer in years. I mostly worked on corporate Windows computers and my last Mac was a latest generation MacBook Pro 16 inch with corporate installed malware.
One pretty obvious example happened in the 2000s where the major 3 operating systems switched to desktop compositing almost simultaneously. You suddenly jump from requiring memory for just one framebuffer to requiring memory for one framebuffer + a copy of all the windows you have created.
> And this leaks into everything - just keeping a single display fed at 60 Hz takes up 2 GByte/s of memory bandwidth, more than half of what your dual-channel RDRAM setup could even deliver.
Does anyone know how practical are any countermeasures, for instance is tinycorelinux tinyx working for anyone?
I’m particularly interested in all the used Chromebooks floating around and what are some ways to trick them out with customized Linux.
Just for your example, 1024x768 would require a minimum of 3 MB just for a single buffer of pixels if stored with today's typical 4-byte RGBA and updated in immediate mode. A double-buffering technique would take twice as much. Most often, we were using either 8-bit pseudo-color mode or maybe 2-byte 15-bit true color with only 5 bits per RGB component and no transparency. A 2MB card might support 1024x768 in 15-bit mode or 1280x1024 in 8-bit mode.
I distinctly remember on my first serious Linux machine when I downloaded a single large JPEG image from an academic site and displayed it with the "xv" command which was the go-to image viewer at the time. It required virtual memory swapping because the image buffer to store the decoded image would be larger than my entire 20MB of system RAM. This was an unusual image, interesting to me mostly for this fact. As I recall, it was a high resolution scan of an ancient manuscript.
It is Linux that now slow and bloated, not speaking of layers of GTK lard that can not render a window with simple controls without consuming hundreds of megabytes.
> I only spent about 1 hour playing round. But it left me distraught.
I know what you mean.
One of the biggest shocks I've had recently was researching this:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w...
(I had a very much not cheap Ensoniq SoundScape Elite)
> very expensive family computers in 2000 with "no sound support."
This was not a family computer. It was an expensive high-end professional machine.
But saying that... yes, you're right, and that is the primary reason why I called it out in the review 23 years ago.
I felt it was inexcusable then (and now it looks even worse, of course).
The secondary reason, which I couldn't spell out so clearly without losing the magazine several £million in advertising per year, was this:
If one of the biggest PC companies selling its own hardware with this OS can't get the sound chip working, this tells you several things:
* They are not very expert at doing this and that means they don't really know what they are doing. So, if you want all your devices to work, smoothly, and keep working, you should choose a specialist vendor instead.
* That this OS is not really ready for prime time yet because even a major vendor can't get its sound support working, so watch out, and don't buy this for any kind of audio work.
In other words, pointing out a minor flaw was my way of putting up a big warning sign.